1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to resource management in a wireless communication system, and in particular, to a method of reducing the overhead of an uplink control message to increase resource efficiency in a wireless communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically in a cellular wireless communication system, information about neighbor base stations (BSs) is collected to facilitate initial network connection and handover for a mobile subscriber station (MSS). To serve this purpose, a serving BS periodically transmits a channel request message to collect the channel information of neighbor BSs over a wireless network. An MSS, upon receipt of the channel request message, scans channels from the neighbor BSs and transmits channel information messages regarding the neighbor BSs to the serving BS.
To exchange information about the neighbor BSs, the serving BS and the MSS identify the neighbor BSs by global identifiers (IDs) specific to them. Therefore, control messages such as the channel request message and the channel information message include global IDs that identify the neighbor BSs.
In an Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.16a system, for instance, a serving BS broadcasts information about neighbor BSs by a neighbor advertisement message to help an MSS to select the best cell. The neighbor advertisement message includes global IDs that identify the neighbor BSs. The MSS scans the channels of the neighbor BSs based on the neighbor advertisement message and transmits the channel scanning results to the serving BS by an uplink report message. Also, the MSS uses a global ID to notify the serving BS of a new BS to which the MSS will move during handover.
However, since the global IDs are rather long, transmission of all the global IDs in the uplink report message causes considerable overhead.
Moreover, the neighbor BSs are already known between the serving BS and the MSS in most cases because handover occurs within a neighbor BS set and the neighbor BS set is periodically broadcasted by the neighbor advertisement message. Accordingly, there is a need for reducing the overhead caused by transmitting such global IDs.